Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library

https://www.billboard.com/business/streaming/spotify-music-library-leak-1236143970/

by _vqpz • 7 months ago

54 82 7 months ago

billboard.com

Previously: Backing up Spotify - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339 - Dec 2025 (634 comments)

_vqpz• 7 months ago

Previously - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339

dang• 7 months ago

We'll add that to the toptext. Thanks!

firloop3• 7 months ago

I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives. Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.

PunchyHamster• 7 months ago

They can't, their overlords would be very unhappy with it. Record industries are heavy in on DRM.

gpm• 7 months ago

Are they really? Nearly every song is uploaded by it's creator to YouTube which has no DRM at all...

rendaw• 7 months ago

It's probably up to the publishers, not them.

I buy my music, but at the same time I respect that Spotify is a bit more unified than any of the 100 video streaming services that don't have the one thing I want to watch.

o_____________o• 7 months ago

Simply sharing metadata, related artists, genres, etc would create a pretty interesting ecosystem[1].

[1] https://everynoise.com/

piva00• 7 months ago

Every Noise was created by a former Spotify employee.

tene80i2• 7 months ago

Not even in the “providing a way to get music” way?

nemomarx• 7 months ago

A big database that contains every song is pretty different from a recommendation system, web streaming, playlists, etc. Someone could use the dump to create something like that ofc, but the database itself isn't really the interesting thing Spotify offers.

Aurornis2• 7 months ago

I wish Spotify welcomed or collaborated with these archival initiatives.

Spotify licenses the music in their library under specific terms. They don't own it. They can't just decide to give out freely on their own terms.

Anna's Archive does not compete with Spotify in any way.

I think HN often underestimates the breadth of casual piracy among the general public who want to avoid paying $10/month for a service. There are already numerous tools to stream TV shows and movies from torrents on demand. I have no doubt the same will appear for a giant archive of Spotify music. A lot of people will jump at any chance to cancel their Spotify subscription if they can get close to the same access for free.

firloop3• 7 months ago

I doubt such a tool would be allowed in the major mobile app stores. The library of music isn't the product.

vablings• 7 months ago

Fuck those licensing terms. They are the exact reason I cant make a Soundcloud notification bot for discord that is within the rules of the ToS. I sent them an email asking for an API key and basically got told no, license holders rule our world.

FireBeyond2• 7 months ago

They're all for the rules, now.

How many people remember how Spotify... uhhh... "seeded" its music database at the start? (There's a hint in my question.)

unethical_ban• 7 months ago

Spotify's (and the other huge streamers) main selling points are its catalogue, it's recommendations/auto playlists. Other features like steaming quality, UI, and network effects are also at play.

Even the metadata is a huge proprietary data dump. Not sure how you think apple, Google, Amazon or an upstart budget streaming service couldn't use this to better compete against Spotify.

maxloh• 7 months ago

I don't think music producer would agree to that. Spotify would likely lose contracts even if they simply opted for silence.

twostorytower• 7 months ago

Anna's archive offers to share their data for AI training (in exchange for donations), so that's certainly something the record labels want control of. https://annas-archive.org/llm

NoPicklez3• 7 months ago

It's also probably something the artists themselves was control of as well

thenthenthen• 7 months ago

I am flabbergasted by the comments here, Spotify started with pirated music and now invests in the military.

https://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-helped-spotify-b...

And

https://djmag.com/news/spotifys-daniel-ek-leads-eu600-millio...

veeti• 7 months ago

It is actually a good thing to invest in blowing up fascists, especially in the context of an ongoing land invasion.

danielscrubs• 7 months ago

@thenthenthen Spotify doesn’t, its founder who has now moved on is investing.

josfredo• 7 months ago

To me it is the “in any way” at the end. I can’t possibly understand the blind desire to distort reality by using mere words.

firloop3• 7 months ago

Maybe I was too hyperbolic, but when I read the original Anna's Archive announcement post, I appreciated their dedication to archiving content that may be lost one day. They called the effort "Backing up Spotify" and emphasized the good that opening the data could do. It's not about enabling piracy.

Following Anna's logic, I was calling on Spotify to stop "investigating" archivists. Spotify could instead be engaging constructively here, with Anna's Archive, Internet Archive, or other groups.

NoPicklez3• 7 months ago

I don't know whether Spotify could agree to provide its entire library of music to an archive for Torrenting by anyone.

Its not just about Spotify, but the record labels and the artists themselves.

For a community that usually wants to allow artists control over their music, or better yet people control over their own information in general. It surprises me that people are now okay with music being scraped and freely put online.

ipsum2• 7 months ago

Anti scraping measures are making it more difficult to use the web. I can't load a single GitHub pull request without being accused of botting.

Aurornis2• 7 months ago

I can't load a single GitHub pull request without being accused of botting.

The only time I encountered this was after a power outage when my ISP's DHCP server handed me a new IP that was tainted. It felt like every major website was suddenly full of captchas.

Eventually I had to unplug the router for 24 hours until the ISP let go of my DHCP reservation. When I reconnected it gave me a new IP and the problems went away.

udave• 7 months ago

wasn't spotify started out as a collection of pirated songs? somethings go in full circle I guess.

glitcher• 7 months ago

And also being the successor to Napster, the irony is thick with this quote:

"Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy"

Funny thing, I've met a lot of independent artists who don't care about piracy one bit. I have a feeling it's the record labels and large corporations, not the artists, making the biggest fuss over piracy.

sosborn• 7 months ago

For an independent artist, exposure matters more than album sales as it leads to ticket sales.

For large labels, exposure is a solved problem and album sales are all that matters.

They are all trying to maximize revenue, they just have different ways of going about it.

kotaKat• 7 months ago

It's only "fairness" when Spotify does it.

int32_64• 7 months ago

Convenience won.

How many people are actually going to download a torrent client, navigate through some massive torrent file collection to check the files of the artists they want to download so they can upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable like it's 2004 again, just so they can avoid paying Spotify?

cakealert• 7 months ago

A sufficiently seeded torrent is a high latency static CDN.

You just need a client that can make use of it.

I'm not sure if anyone will be interested in making one however, you can already get a patched Spotify APK from the usual mobile piracy spaces that's good enough.

Raed6672• 7 months ago

Wasn't popcorn-time basically video streaming backed by torrent ? Why can't it be the same for audio ?

The metadata is 200 GB which can be easily indexed and could be made searchable, then you download only what you need

grandpoobah• 7 months ago

Now that's a cool idea.

madduci2• 7 months ago

And specifically, not everybody owns a NAS with 300 TB capacity. At 30TB drive for almost 1000€, we are talking about 10-15000€.

As mentioned in other stories, this is really welcomed by other big corps or LLM related companies

lm284693• 7 months ago

Most people won't listen to 10tb of unique tracks in their entire lives, let alone 30tb or 300tb... 1tb of music is about a full year of 24/7 unique tracks

nickv• 7 months ago

Datahorder here, a 26tb drive is about $375, so I don't think your quote of 30tb drive prices make sense. You can get about 80tb for $1000

realusername• 7 months ago

Great, so the copyright conglomerates have nothing to complain about if it's useless then.

halJordan• 7 months ago

That's unnecessarily worst case. No one is seriously using a usb cable to upload mp3s. There are plenty of paid and free spotify clones anyone can throw up.

makeitdouble• 7 months ago

upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable

The more interesting part is how this is your mental model of actually "physically" owning music.

The amount of messaging that will be needed to explain how home servers are convenient is pretty crazy.

_lvbh• 7 months ago

upload mp3s to their phone over a USB cable like it's 2004 again, just so they can avoid paying Spotify?

I do that not because I don't want to pay Spotify, but because it is more convenient. I want all of my music in one place (VLC), and Spotify doesn't let me export my library as OPUS or Flac. Some stuff in my library is only posted on SoundCloud, some are old mp3 recordings by friends, and another 30% are only on YouTube (small cover artists)

breppp11• 7 months ago

Probably a net positive for future open source music generation LLM models

aiisimmoral• 7 months ago

Which means a net negative for humanity.

breppp11• 7 months ago

Depends, the camera killed painting and is a positive for art in my opinion

It's not obvious that LLM generation won't create more interesting music experiences (for lack of non-marketing speak for self curated music)

Raed6672• 7 months ago

I'm hoping that this metadata leak can revive projects like https://everynoise.com

Spotify (and netflix etc..) have become very hostile to exposing their catalogue over API, so i'm glad they've gotten open sourced :)

mystraline• 7 months ago

Oooh, scary. "Investigations!"

This is a archivalist institution that actively ignores "copyright" to further the art and science of our shared media legacy.

And frankly, public libraries would absolutely be deemed illegal if they were made 10 years ago. (And it was only because rich people like Rockefeller wanted to wash their actual history with a social-happy persona.)

puppycodes• 7 months ago

long live anna's archive.

a true gift to humanity.

unbrella• 7 months ago

I'm not sure why nobody else is seeing this, but this was a MASSIVE operations failure on Spotify. Any other company would've noticed an attacker downloading 86 million songs / 256m metadata. This is showing they cut corners. 2/3 their purpose as a streaming platform is to protect the digital content they licensed, and they failed miserably.

Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library

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